Following on from last week, I've now finished this week's MAKE FILMS assignment. Here is a little video about one of my favourite things to do....gardening. Specifically, growing vegetables and fruit - and then cooking and eating what I grow!

I'm really lucky to have a garden (a rarity in London) so I don't take it for granted and am grateful for every bean, potato, tomato and stalk of rhubarb my little patch has produced so far.

Learning to garden has been very much a trial and error thing for me - sometimes I have successes, but more often than not things don't go according to plan!

The greatest lesson gardening has taught me - which I try to apply to life in general - is that you have to let go of the things you can't control. You might take every precaution necessary to protect your plants from squirrels, slugs and birds, but then there might be a drought, or a storm, or you'll pick something or dig something up too early, and all your work is down the drain. You can't take these things personally, but merely chalk it up to experience, process the lessons for next time, and move on.

It's also one of the most absorbing, calming, lose-yourself-in-the-moment tasks I can think of. Time stops for a while and you find yourself talking to your basil plants or watching in fascination as bees, pollen drunk, float from flower to flower.

I'm always learning, trying to go with the flow of nature and the seasons, and every now and then there's a delicious triumph.

Happiness comes with a bit of dirt under the nails, I think.

PS: Turn the sound on for music - and spray bottle sound effects! Music is 'Take Me Higher' by Jahzzar - http://betterwithmusic.com/

Every year, I've made a resolution to learn to meditate and start a meditation practice.

I've been making that resolution for about nine years, maybe longer.

The reason I kept trying? Because every interview with or profile of anyone I admire - whether they're a writer, a public figure, an entrepreneur, or just a generally enlightened and content person - usually mentions meditation in some way. That it is key to their creative practice, to balance, to keeping calm, to staying sane. That it opens the door between the person they are, or have to be in the world, and the person they want to be.

At the start of this year, a friend gifted me Danielle LaPorte's The Desire Map, a much-spoken of phenomena in the online world that gets a lot of traction around New Year, and with good reason - it's a pretty effective system for driving down into what you really want for your life. One of the activities is 'Core Desired Feelings' and after much excavation and brainstorming, two of my four were 'calm' and 'wise'.

Much of the work in programmes like this centres very much around action and sovereignty when it comes to what you want to happen in your life. In other words, what do you have to do to feel the way you want to feel? What is something you can do, that is within your control, right now to get you closer to where you want to be?

The answer for those two particular desires I had identified in myself was.....meditate.

So, around the same time I did the Desire Map work, I began experimenting with meditation with the help of a wonderful (and free!) app I highly recommend called Insight Timer. This is the moment to tell you this is not a sponsored post, in any way, I just love this app! I think Laura might have recommended it to me too.

The app was great. But instantly I was reminded of why I had abandoned all previous attempts - because my mind was so manic, it wouldn't focus. I could barely get through 60 seconds.

"Just focus on your breath" - sounds easy, am I right? Wrong.

After many months now, the trick that has helped me the most in learning to meditate has been thinking of my mind as a puppy in training. What do you say to a puppy when you're trying to teach it?

"Stay."

So every time I notice my mind wandering in meditation, as it always does, I call it to heel like I would an adorable puppy. Hearing the word "stay" does jolt my mind back to the task at hand. A few breaths and it will stay, like a good mind. Then it wanders off again, and I gently grab it by the collar and lead it back.

It's a nice metaphor, when it works! But my mind isn't always a cute puppy that comes back obediently when it's called. Sometimes meditation for me is like finding the puppy has destroyed the couch, chewed your favourite books and done its business everywhere. Moments like those, I set the timer for 2 minutes and that has to be enough. Miraculously, those 2 minutes do the trick.

The benefits of meditation are seeping into other aspects of my life too. I find I'm calmer in general, able to let things go a lot faster than I used to. I get pissed off, of course but I allow myself to feel it, for five or ten minutes and then, frankly, I get bored and move on! I've also found I'm sleeping better thanks to meditation, even when I'm anxious. Even when I wake up for no reason and can't get back to sleep - the anger and panic at only being 5 hours away from the alarm going off, and then 4, and so on, has dissipated dramatically. I find that I can rest in those moments, even if I don't go back to sleep straight away.

I meditated for 53 days straight over March and April, usually in the evenings, after work, before bed. It seemed to be working. I had gone from barely being able to do 5 minutes to doing guided meditations for half an hour or more. I was on a roll!

But then I lost my winning streak thanks to just one stressful and busy day at the end of April, where making time to meditate merely slipped my mind. Hardly a major crime. But over the next few days, I had one day on, one day off, and it just didn't work. Perhaps the practice hadn't been so carefully carved out as I thought. I found myself feeling really out of sorts and realised that meditation had come to be an essential part of my routine, like perfume, caffeine and morning pages. I didn't feel myself without it. Much like running.

It didn't matter that I'd fallen off the wagon. In fact, there was no wagon. It's a practice. I just had to start again.

Meditation has become part of my daily routine. My rule is "meditation before social media", which means I meditate as soon as I wake up, happily filling the space between being conscious and the coffee being ready.

I didn't expect it to change my life, but it really has.

"Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end." – Jiddu Krishnamurti

More on this subject to come, as I feel it will be quite an adventure, as the post title hints!

"The soil is warming. We gardeners grow ever more watchful, sniffing the air as excitedly as beagles, peering into the vegetation to detect those first thrilling signs of life. Is that a distance haze of green? Wait: did you hear birdsong? At long long last, after months of enforced dormancy, we tell ourselves it might be time to begin." - Charlotte Mendelson, "Rhapsody in Green"

The last weekend in March, I planted early potatoes. A week later, the rhubarb we'd given up for dead did a Jesus and came back to life, the blueberry bush began sprouting green leaves and the cherry tree exploded in pink blossoms.

Tom and I went out for a run and came back to a generous bag of horse manure on the front step, gift of our mechanic, also a keen gardener who told me rhubarb loves horse manure and he had a reliable local source.

My packets of seeds have been out on the bench for the last few weekends, waiting for the right, ripe moment to sow as April marches into May.

As Charlotte Mendelson writes in her lovely book of essays, this is such a nice time of year to be a gardener - a time where hope triumphs over experience, where we sow and are thrilled by the potential, like applying for a job we really want - you send your CV off, put the seed in the ground, and for a while, anything can happen. It's a lovely feeling.

Today I planted french beans and courgettes (zucchini), and there is a tomato plant on my kitchen windowsill. The cherry blossoms are falling and fading, to make way for the green leaves and fruit. The potatoes are thriving. The rhubarb is Trump-like in its determination to beat all the odds and completely take over.

“I think there’s something to be said for making movies faster, rather than slower. I think that the years that are now consumed in obtaining a green light and the funding for a movie, and the amount of rewriting that scripts undergo, overcooks them to the point where a lot of times spontaneousness and a sort-of short-order cooking is lost. Something happens that robs them of a certain spontaneity, and when we were writing at breakneck speed, and turning things around really fast there is a kind of energy and enthusiasm that I think is sometimes lost when you have too much time. Art thrives on restrictions, and it’s not just money that can be restricted to good effect, it’s also sometimes time and the fact that we didn’t have enough time to second-guess ourselves may have worked to the film’s advantage.”

I'm the author of The Latte Years (Nero Books 2016), a memoir about diets, divorce, digging deep and daring to go after your dreams. I'm also an award-winning blogger and journalist. Born in Australia, I now live in London. More about me here.